Saturday, February 9, 2013

At 10:44 Tuesday
morning, emergency units responded to the Hatfield Township Police
Department shooting range on the 300 block of County Line Road for an
injury caused by the accidental discharge of a firearm.

According
to Hatfield police, Sgt. Stephen Gillen of the Upper Gwynedd Township
Police Department was conducting annual firearms training at the range
when a round fired into his left foot while he was removing the weapon
from his holster.

There were also three officers present for the firearms training, Duffy said.

Describing
police work as a “dangerous” job, Duffy said that although it’s rare,
accidents can occur even in a controlled environment such as a police
range.

I love the opening line of the article. "Even with proper training, accidents do happen (when irresponsible and clumsy gun owners are involved).

The gun rights folks have a lot invested in downplaying accidents, as if they're a part of the deal. The truth is, no accidental shooting is possible unless the gun owner breaks two or more of the Four Rules of Gun Safety.

I suspect the alcohol had a lot to do with it. I mean, lawful gun owners are shooting people all the time and getting away with it, but if you add something like being under the influence or lying to the police, you're busted.

A student has been injured in an accidental shooting on the campus of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

The man suffered a wound to the hand.

It happened early this afternoon at the campus radio station KUAF.

Lt.
Matt Mills, with the University of Arkansas Police Department (UAPD)
says the work study student was showing the gun to another student in
the lobby of the station when it accidentally went off.

On the UA Facebook page, the following additional details were posted:The
student was in the station's breakroom, and no one else at the station
was injured. The student's wounds - to his hand - were described as
non-life-threatening.

University of Arkansas Police receive a
call about the shooting at 12:36 and responded to the scene by 12:42.
Fayetteville police and first responders also responded to the incident.
The student was transported to WRMC.

The pistol was described by police as one designed to fire .410 shotgun shells.

Ironically, the university is hosting a gun forum today.

What kind of pistol is that, by the way. Maybe one of the defenders of Arkansas and all gun misuse can tell us.

Police in San Antonio say a group of friends panicked after one of them accidentally shot another in the back, and tried to pin the whole thing on a "Hispanic male" who never existed.

Three men and two women were inside a car near the Las Colinas Apartments on Chase Hill Blvd, having just returned from picking up a gun.
One of the men, a 19-year-old, was reportedly handling the weapon in a "reckless" manner when it suddenly went off, striking one of the women in the lower back.

Emergency services arrived at the scene around midnight and rushed the 20-year-old to a nearby hospital where she remains in stable condition.
According to investigators, the friends who rounded up told officers that the shooting took place during a robbery attempt by an Hispanic male who forced his way into their vehicle.

It was ultimately revealed after hours of interrogation that the story was fabricated to cover up for one of the car's occupants.
He was ultimately found hiding behind the apartment complex, and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and evading arrest.

It's not so bad to shoot someone by accident, people get away with that all the time. But, don't lie to the police about it. That's a sure way to end up in the clink.

The House Democrats' Gun Violence Prevention Task Force released 15
principles today that it says will shape its recommendation for upcoming
legislation. The principles include very broad ideas, such as to
"support initiatives that prevent problems before they start," as well
as more specific proposals, such as to "reinstate and strengthen a
prospective federal ban on assault weapons."

The full list of recommendations is below:

Support the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans

Support citizens' rights to possess firearms for hunting, shooting sports, defense, and other lawful and legitimate purposes

Reinstate and strengthen a prospective federal ban on assault weapons

Reinstate a prospective federal ban on assault magazines

Require
a background check for every gun sale, while respecting reasonable
exceptions for cases such as gifts between family members and temporary
loans for sporting purposes

Strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database

Prosecute those prohibited buyers who attempt to purchase firearms and others who violate federal firearm laws

Pass legislation aimed specifically at cracking down on illegal gun trafficking and straw-purchasing

Restore funding for public safety and law enforcement initiatives aimed at reducing gun violence

Support initiatives that prevent problems before they start

Close the holes in our mental-health system and make sure that care is available for those who need it

Help our communities get unwanted and illegal guns out of the hands of those who don't want them or shouldn't have them

Support responsible gun ownership

Take steps to enhance school safety

Address our culture's glorification of violence seen and heard though our movie screens, television shows, music and video games

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Gun owners, above most everything besides the Second Amendment
argument, posit that the problems with gun violence are not due to
“responsible” gun owners…it is always them, the other guy –
criminals, the mentally unstable, well…you know, THEM. The foundation of
their argument is that they, the beleaguered, hounded, falsely blamed,
honest, hardworking gun owners, are completely upright and
responsible…they are just not the problem. EVER.

Seven states – California, New York, Connecticut, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado – have, in the past month,
introduced bills to have gun owners put their money where their mouth
is: liability insurance for their firearms, codifying that
responsibility if their firearms are used incorrectly – used by children
who find them, by criminals who easily steal them; by people to whom
they sell them without requiring a background check.

A deputy U.S. marshal suffered "minimal injuries" to the upper leg
when the officer's gun accidentally went off during training at the
Pinellas County Sheriff's Office shooting range Wednesday morning,
according to U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Ron Lindbak.

Members
of the Marshal's Service, which tracks down fugitives and provides
security for federal judges, were at the range at 11700 34th St. N in
St. Petersburg to conduct shooting exercises, according to a sheriff's
news release. Then a gun went off, causing what the sheriff's office
described as a "self-inflicted gunshot wound to the upper leg."

Lindbak said the wounded marshal was taken to a local hospital for treatment, but he did not know which hospital.

Those familiar with pro-gun activists know that they love a good
quote. Do some surfing on pro-gun websites and you will find a cottage
industry of quotations from American leaders and other voices of wisdom
from throughout history. Some are legitimate, and some are completely
bogus, but all are cherry-picked and presented entirely without context
to suggest that their subjects hold the same pro-gun beliefs as Ted Nugent.Even history’s greatest proponents of nonviolence are not immune from
such treatment. This includes Mohandas Gandhi himself, whose words
appear on countless pro-gun websites as follows:
“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will
look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”Pro-gun activists frequently use those words to suggest
that Gandhi supported individual gun ownership both as a means of
defending oneself and as a tool to violently resist government tyranny.
But are these assertions true?In that passage, Gandhi references India’s Arms Act of 1878,
which gave Europeans in India the right to carry firearms but prevented
Indians from doing so, unless they were granted a license by the
British colonial government. The full text of what he wrote is: “Among
the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon
the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the
Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a
golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to
Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the
ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.”

These words come from a World War I recruitment pamphlet that Gandhi
published in 1918, urging Indians to fight with their British colonial
oppressors in the war, not against them.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually
protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the
1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at
all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and
Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often
in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in
self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in
self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four
accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.

The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially
negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway,
director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making
women safer, a gun in the home is “a particularly strong risk factor”
for female homicides and the intimidation of women.

In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women
increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to
a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003.
Further, there was “no clear evidence” that victims’ access to a gun
reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe
of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun
in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with
no gun at home.
Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk.

An analysis by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate partners at a much lower rate. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has used this fact to press the case for universal background checks, to make sure that domestic abusers legally prohibited from having guns cannot get them.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Former airline captain Philip Marshall, 54,
killed his son Alex, 17, and daughter Macaila, 14, each with a single
bullet to the head, as they slept nestled under blankets on the living
room couch. He then pointed the gun at his head and committed suicide.
Both children attended Bret Harte High School.

According to an online biography, Marshall was a former government
special aviation contract pilot and flew missions for the U.S.
government in connection with the DEA and CIA. He wrote a book about his
experiences during the Iran-Contra incident in the 1980s. Callaway said
Marshall had also written two conspiracy theory books focused on 911.
He made the argument that the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia were
responsible for the incident, not terrorist groups, which she feels
could have made him enemies in high places.

"Senator, there needs to be a change in the culture of prosecution
at the entire federal level. It's a national disgrace. The fact is, we
could dramatically cut crime in this country with guns and save lives
all over this country if we would start enforcing the 9,000 federal laws
we have on the books.”
— National Rifle Association Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jan. 30, 2013

Many readers have asked us about this claim of 9,000
federal gun laws, which was later repeated by Chris Wallace on Fox News
Sunday when LaPierre appeared on that program. When we checked with NRA
spokesman Andrew Arulanandam for the sourcing, he said that LaPierre had
misspoken.
“If anything, he understated the number of laws,” Arulanandam said, noting that the NRA generally refers to “20,000 laws.”

The Pinocchio Test

By any reasonable measure, this is suspicious figure. Its
origin is murky, and it is inconceivable that the same number of gun
laws would exist now as some five decades ago.

Moreover, even
experts who favor the NRA’s agenda have their doubts about the figure or
its relevance. It may well be the case that there are “thousands” of
laws, but what does that mean? What does counting statutes, or local
regulations, say about the quality or effectiveness of those laws?
We
don’t play gotcha here at The Fact Checker, so we accept that LaPierre
misspoke when he said 9,000 federal laws rather than 20,000 laws across
the nation. But that slip of the tongue actually points out the fuzzy
nature of the claim.

This 20,000 figure appears to be an
ancient guesstimate that has hardened over the decades into a constantly
repeated, never-questioned talking point. It could be lower, or higher,
depending on who’s counting what.

UPDATE: Anthony, and a number of other readers, asked
why this merited Three Pinocchios. The Pinnochio rating is always the
hardest part of the column and certainly is subject to debate.
In
this case, the rating is based on the fact that the figure had been
used for almost five decades, without much research or diligence to back
it up. Both sources cited by the NRA--Wright and Halbrook--said the
figure was not particularly credible, with Wright saying it was not
relevant and Halbrook labeling it as hyperbole. Korwin outlined a number
of issues with the figure in his essay.
Ultimately, it comes
down to the fact that the “20,000”--or “9,000”--amounts to false
precision. The argument the NRA wants to make is no less credible if the
talking point was that there are “many, many laws,” rather than 20,000
or 9,000. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but the fact that
this factoid had been repeated so often and for so long is ultimately
what tipped it to three.

This aired a week or so ago. It was the first time I saw that old clip of Wayne La Pierre supporting universal background checks. Since then it's been used several times. At one of them, Orlin said Wayne's not guilty of flip-flopping, like I'd said, but rather this shows an evolution in his thinking and he's just being honest about it.

What do you think?

Also, what do you think about the foolishness of claiming that criminals will not obey laws? Jon Stewart put that one down with a joke better than all our efforts to argue against its stupidity. Oftentimes the pro-gun folks say that one as a straw-man argument pretending that gun control folks are so naive that we believe it. In the Senate hearing, La Pierre seemed to be saying it seriously, hence Jon Stewart's joke.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Several misperceptions are being aired in their media about guns and their relationship to crime in Australia by US "pro-gun" advocates. Australia is often cited in the US debate due to its institution of strict firearms laws. US "pro-gun" advocates are using data and findings from the early-2000s to argue that the Howard government gun reforms had little effect on violent crime in Australia.

This is because of arguments around the impact on gun crime after the 1996 ban and buy-back of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns following the Port Arthur massacre (35 killed, and 23 wounded) and the 2002 ban on both concealable and large-calibre automatic handguns in response to the Monash University shootings (two students killed and five wounded). Australia's firearms laws were seen by gun control activists as a test case for action against automatic weapons in the US and by the pro-gun lobby as an experiment that failed.

Dr Samantha Bricknell, a principal research analyst at the Australian Institute of Criminology addressed this in a piece published in the Brisbane Courier-Mail:

In the second decade of the 21st century the data was collected over a longer period and was more comprehensive, with real trends evident.
While
there can be no direct comparisons of gun policies between Australia
and the US - the "right to bear arms" is certainly not enshrined in the
Australian Constitution - there are still lessons to be learnt from the
1996 Howard government buy-back and the current set of trend data.
These
show that, while gun crime still exists and poses a law enforcement
challenge in Australia, rates of gun-related crime have dropped
significantly since the 1990s.
In the latter part of the '90s, 25 to 30 per cent of armed robberies involved guns.
From
1999 onwards, the average has been 15 per cent or about 1000
gun-related armed robberies a year and this has remained fairly static.
Homicide shows a similar trend.
In
the mid-'90s between 50 and 100 homicides per year involved the use of a
gun and this has reduced to 30 to 40 homicides over the past six years
with a decline in the general murder rate to about one per 100,000
persons.
Most importantly since 1996 there have been no multiple
killings using automatic long-arms and the Monash event in 2002 was the
last handgun-related mass shooting.

The most recent AIC reports and statistics on gun-crime in Australia can be found at aic.gov.au/publications

Alabama, North Dakota, and Wyoming were the most conservative states
in the union in 2012, with between 49% and 50% of residents in each
identifying their ideology as conservative. Residents of the District of
Columbia were by far the most likely to identify as liberal (41%),
followed by Massachusetts (31%), Oregon, and Vermont (each at 29%
liberal).
The general rule that conservative = pro-gun is perfectly illustrated in the 10 most conservative. The opposite list includes some anomalies like Washington and Vermont, but overall we can continue to say conservative = Republican = pro-gun and liberal = Democrat = pro-gun-control.

Another thing to notice is the conservative states are extremely conservative while the liberal ones aren't so much so.

When Fort Worth Police Chief Jeffrey Halstead visited Capitol Hill
last week to push for tighter gun control measures, he had some unwanted
help from a felon back in Texas, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports:

At 5 p.m. Tuesday, Halstead was meeting with Sen. John Cornyn,
R-Texas, in Washington, D.C., to discuss gun control concerns of the
Major Cities Chiefs Association…At that time, his concerns were being played out at a Haltom City
auto shop, where one of his officers and personal friend—21-year veteran
John Bell—was shot [in the head] by a convicted felon being pursued by
Haltom City police.

This should serve as a compelling illustration of why our country
needs tighter gun control laws. But then, so should the murder of 20
elementary schoolers by a maniac with an assault rifle—and we all know
how far that has gone to sway people like Cornyn.

If anybody can change the minds of Republican senators, however, it's
probably somebody like Halstead, who represents a "cowboy town" in
what's arguably the most pro-gun state in America. "We almost see every
week where we have officers being ambushed by people who have no right
to possess those weapons," Halstead told the Star-Telegram.

Halstead's Major City Chiefs Association is part of a coalition
of nine national police organizations that supports a ban on
semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and advocates
expanded background checks.

The standoff between law enforcement and an Alabama man who held a
boy in a bunker for seven days ended with the suspect dead and the
5-year-old safely rescued.Reports of an explosion at Jimmy Lee Dykes' Midland City property came first on Monday afternoon, followed by media reports of the 65-year-old's death.The boy, identified only as Ethan, was transported to a hospital, state Rep. Steve Clouse told CNN. He appeared physically unharmed, according to reports.

Todd Getgen | Attorney Todd Getgen, 42, was taking his custom AR-15 to
the range to squeeze of a few rounds. It would be the last thing he
ever did. After arriving at a shooting range in Cumberland County, Pa.,
Getgen was seen by Raymond Peake, 66, a former prison corrections
officer intent on overthrowing the US government. According to ABC 27,
Peake coveted Getgen’s rifle. So Peake murdered Getgen at the shooting
range, filling him with so many bullet fragments that the coroner who
conducted his autopsy was unable to list the injuries in
sequence. Until pleading no contest and receiving a life sentence,
Peake had claimed that Getgen was already dead when he arrived at the
gun range – Peake claimed that he was only taking Getgen’s rifle in
order to help arm an insurrectionary group committed to rising up
against the government.

The site highlights 5 deaths including three murders. Using Google, it took about ten seconds to see that murders at gun ranges are not unheard of, like our commenter said on the other thread. He actually said it as if he'd done an exhaustive search and come up empty.

Why do gun rights folks so often think they can say anything they want and be believed? I think they actually believe they're in a battle with the gun control side and all's fair. But it makes it very hard to believe anything else they have to say, don't you think?

I agree with everything he says except the inference that these few examples somehow represent the gun control movement at large. That's just not the case. I'm all for restrictions and even bans on realistic-looking toy guns and replica weapons, but the examples given here are nothing short of hysteria.

On the other hand, isn't it a bit contradictory to imply that teachers in the nanny state are like this, generally speaking, and at the same time suggest that arming teachers is the solution?

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Kyle and Littlefield had taken Routh to the range, said Travis Cox, the director of a nonprofit Kyle helped found. Littlefield was Kyle’s neighbor and “workout buddy,” Cox told The Associated Press on Sunday morning.“What I know is Chris and a gentleman — great guy, I knew him well, Chad Littlefield — took a veteran out shooting who was struggling with PTSD to try to assist him, try to help him, try to, you know, give him a helping hand and he turned the gun on both of them, killing them,” Cox said.

The NRA has attempted to the patriotic card when refusing any legislation denying access to guns to the mentally ill. The NRA has claimed it would "unpatriotic" to deny guns to returning servicemen suffering from PTSD and other mental illnesses.

“What strikes me is we’ve actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people and we’ve seen certainly Wayne LaPierre and some of these others. It’s bizarre,” he said. They have this vision that we’re living in a Mad Max movie and that nothing can be done about it. That America cannot manage unless everybody’s prepared to shoot intruders, that the idea that we have police forces that provide public safety is somehow totally impractical, despite the fact that, you know, that is, in fact, the way we live.”The “terms of the debate have shifted,” Krugman added. “Now the craziness of the extreme pro-gun lobby has been revealed, and that has got to move the debate and got to move the legislation at least to some degree.”Yes, plenty of gun owners fine, Krugman said, responding to the criticism that he’s lumping everyone together. But guns are the problem.“The lobbying groups, the NRA is now revealed as an insane organization, and that matters quite a lot,” he said.

It's kind of refreshing that the vast majority of Americans are realizing just how wacky the NRA is. But it's something I've sagely noted for quite some time.

BTW, it's rather amusing to note the intertoobz has discovered the NRA has an Enemies List. This is something we've known about for, oh, about 10 years.

Farago, 53, lives in an elegant house on the east side of town. He drives a Mercedes. He’s got an exquisite art collection. He has beautiful Persian rugs. Before he takes his miniature schnauzers on a walk in his upscale neighborhood, he fits them with doggie parkas.

Also:

“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”

Former Navy SEAL and "American Sniper" author Chris Kyle was fatally shot along with another man Saturday on a Texas gun range, a sheriff told local newspapers.

Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant said Kyle, 38, and a second man were found dead at Rough Creek Lodge's shooting range west of Glen Rose, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Stephenville Empire-Tribune. Glen Rose is about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

The most extensive study yet by the U.S. government on suicide among
military veterans shows more veterans are killing themselves than
previously thought, with 22 deaths a day – or one every 65 minutes, on
average.

The study released on Friday by the Department of Veterans Affairs
covered suicides from 1999 to 2010 and compared with a previous, less
precise VA estimate that there were roughly 18 veteran deaths a day in
the United States.

More than 69 percent of veteran suicides were among individuals aged 50 years or older, the VA reported.

A
6-year-old South Carolina girl will be allowed back in school after
being expelled early in January for bringing a toy gun for “show and
tell,” school officials said Thursday.Naomi McKinney was expelled from Alice Drive Elementary in Sumter, S.C. on Jan. 7.
“I chose to bring it to school because I thought I could show my
friends it because they might like seeing it,” she told a reporter.Her father Hank objected to the decision as well, saying that pencils
are more dangerous than the clear, plastic water gun Naomi brought to
school. “I know there is a lot going on with guns and schools and that
is tragic, but a six year old bringing a toy to school doesn’t know
better,” he said.Naomi’s
initial expulsion banned her from school grounds for the rest of the
school year, but the county’s schools superintendent said Thursday that he would overrule the decision he had previously affirmed.

What a bunch of crybabies. First they said the photo was a fake, now they say it doesn't matter compared to a lifetime of supporting gun control. Oh, and of course there'll be lots who question the meaning of "all the time."

This is what happens when inexplicable Obama hatred mixes with gun-rights fanaticism. Skeet birthers they're called.

Arming teachers and staff in all schools would mean even more guns
sold. The slaughter of 20 first-graders, the impassioned testimony of a
former congresswoman debilitated by a shot to the head, the logic of
background checks and limits on the sale of assault weapons and
high-capacity magazines — none of that swayed Mr. LaPierre.

This
is not surprising. The purpose of NRA lobbying is to help the firearms
industry sell more weapons and ammunition. Individual NRA members can be
used to yell “self-defense” or “Second Amendment” as a smoke screen.

This has become exceedingly clear, especially in the prevaricating response to the background checks question.